


Come Sing About Love

by Ressick



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-04
Updated: 2011-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 23:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10545986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ressick/pseuds/Ressick
Summary: Old fic from LJ, dragged over here.  Callie muses on love and faith.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N** : I use no real churches in this story; I invented the ones I mention so any relation to any actual church in Seattle is unintended. I wrote this because it seems Callie does struggle with her faith, yet it’s mostly off-screen. And I remember those struggles coming from a devout Catholic childhood, even if I haven’t actually been Catholic in 19 years. YMMV, of course, faith is deeply personal. Title from a lyric in Godspell. One direct quote from the show. If my meager Spanish is as bad as I think it is, please correct me.

  
  
Calliope Torres has always believed in God. Perhaps it comes from having a very religious family, or the thirteen years of Catholic schooling she excelled at. She knows her Bible, read it regularly as a teen, loved her Catechism classes, believes in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and all the saints and apostles.  
  
She’s had her faith tested of course. Her time in Botswana, seeing the suffering, the lack, the need there, had tested her. But she’d also seen what the doctors and volunteers were doing, fighting that lack, trying their best to meet those needs, and decided God had shown her this so that she could fight it. She became the best orthopedic surgeon she could in the hope of inventing new techniques and making cartilage with Jell-O for the purpose of sending that knowledge and material out into the world. She knew it would be funded to fix athlete’s knees, but wanted it for the little kids so they could walk, the accident victims, the returning damaged soldiers, all the people who weren’t paid a few million a year to throw a ball around. Until then, she writes in her articles the best ways to adapt her cutting edge techniques for less-fortunate hospitals who don’t have all the newest equipment, and donates to Doctors Without Borders.  
  
Then when George cheated on her, and she went through the divorce, she wondered how God could send her this kind, gentle man who then proceeded to betray her. She doesn’t quite believe that divorce is as bad a sin as the Church says – her aunt’s four divorces kind of put paid to that idea, as her aunt is a wonderful person – but it still hurts. She almost files for an annulment, leaves the papers half filled out in her desk drawer, and then George dies, and she can’t bear to do it. Then she realizes they never went to Church and got their marriage blessed, so maybe it doesn’t matter.  
  
And she does go to Mass. If she has a Saturday, Sunday, or Wednesday off, she’ll take an hour to head to the big cathedral downtown to catch a Mass, in either English or Spanish, whatever’s available. She hasn’t gone to Confession since moving to Seattle years ago, but she takes Communion anyway, figuring that God knows what she did, what she’s sorry for, and that’s enough.  
  
What stops her from going to Mass is the first one she attends after Erica Hahn leaves her in a parking lot. She’s conflicted as it is, she loves Erica, is attracted to her which is surprising enough, but she’s not sure she’s _in_ love with her friend that just abandoned her. And that confusion, plus the mistake of sleeping with Mark, and the whole Izzie Stevens heart stealing thing, and being left in a parking lot, means she’s pretty much a mess. One of the best friends she’d ever had disappeared a week ago, and it was the first time she’d been to Mass in months – previously she’d been so caught up in her friendship and then whatever it was with Erica that she hadn’t been going, swapping Mass for sunrise yoga and long talks and then kissing and semi-awkward sex.  
  
Her mind wanders during much of the Mass, eyes tracing the statues in corners and the gorgeous Tiffany stained glass in the windows, until the homily. Which is weird, usually she zones out for that part the most, as the priest is kind of boring. She usually prefers the homilies of the priest who does Mass in Spanish, but she had the time off for the English one this week. She’s not sure that the theme of this week’s homily would be any better in a different language. Apparently the diocese is kicking off a campaign to fund anti-gay marriage initiatives throughout the Pacific Northwest, specifically to fight the expansion of the state of Washington’s domestic partnership law. Part of her freezes inside. The priest drones on, becoming almost excited as he talks about how homosexuality is against natural law, against God’s law. About how as good Catholics they must reject sin, reject any law that would grant homosexuals any recognition of their sin as something allowable.  
  
Callie Torres doesn’t think about marriage much anymore. Her one attempt had been pathetic, and she tries to forget it even happened – which isn’t hard, she was a bit too drunk to really remember the wedding anyway, Elvis is a blur in her mind. But she does remember the soldier Meredith treated the year before – news had slowly trickled through the hospital with a sort of reverent respect that was unusual for gossip. She’d added an extra go around the rosary to her prayers for the two men that week, hoping they both would find peace, even with one of them dead and the other now alone in a homophobic military. She thinks of Jesse Campbell, a friend from high school who had come out at the end of their senior year, quietly, to pretty much just her and a couple other friends, and had left that summer for New York City after his parents threw him out for being gay. She’d slipped him as much cash as she could at the bus station, and begged him to keep in touch, but it had been almost a decade since she’d heard anything. And she thinks of her nights with Erica, however awkward and strange she had felt, there had been something unerringly right about their hesitant touches, as real and honest as George or Mark or any other man had felt. As the priest continues his diatribe in the midst of calling for money, her stomach turns. If Erica had stayed, if they had worked through their issues, he could have been talking about _them_. About their relationship, whatever it might have evolved into. Slowly, she gathers her coat and purse, and sneaks out of the Church as soon as the priest finishes speaking and moves on in the Mass.  
  
She feels abandoned by her Church, and doesn’t go back. She thinks about it, sometimes, when she prays the rosary while sitting on her couch with a bottle of tequila. Callie’s never been particularly _religious_ in the sense of being into doctrine and stuff, she doesn’t think, but she still feels her _faith_ shaken. How could a loving God allow His church to be that way? Let those He called to His service spout diatribes against love? One night, a bit too much tequila under her belt, she googles Catholic and homosexuality, and throws up when she reads the official Church position. Love the sinner hate the sin used to make sense to her – but now it reads more like an excuse to keep hating someone for something they can’t control, shaming them into being alone for their entire lives lest they burn in hell. She’s still not sure exactly where she falls. She doesn’t feel gay, but she knows she’s not exactly straight either, or she wouldn’t be crying in her booze over another woman.  
  
Then this gorgeous blonde kisses her in the bathroom at Joe’s. It’s everything she’s ever wanted in a kiss. She prays with Addison to get over the butterflies, and she does, falling in love, embracing the butterflies that flutter in her gut every time she catches sight of those blue eyes. There are ups and downs. Of course there are. Her heart feels stomped on during their breakup over children, desperate and almost angry with God that she finally found what might be _the one_ and they can’t agree on something as simple to her as babies.  
  
She does two rosaries the night after the shooting, in thanks, when Arizona collapses asleep next to her. She prays silently, moving the beads through her fingers in a comforting ritual, as her girlfriend clutches her, lost in dreams. She’s finally happy again, and keeps ignoring Mass in favor of cooking breakfast for Arizona on their rare shared days off, or spending an evening out at Joe’s dancing. Her girlfriend never mentions the rosary she does at least once a week without fail, usually while sitting on the couch half-watching television. Instead, Arizona just grabs a glass of wine and snuggles up next to her, hand on her thigh, and lets Callie shove the rosary into the drawer on the side table when she’s done. There is a rosary in the living room, one in the bedroom, and one buried at the bottom of her purse.  
  
She stops praying a month into when Arizona is in Africa. For a month she prayed, every day, for Arizona to come back, come home to her. She thinks the prayers were probably garbled under the sobbing, but knows the Blessed Virgin will understand. After a month, she gives up under a haze of surgeries during the day and too much alcohol at night, which leads to the one-night stand with Mark. She wakes up from that sobbing yet again, wishing a much smaller body was next to her. She also hopes that her best friend was too drunk to notice that she called Arizona’s name instead of his.  
  
After Arizona comes back, after her girlfriend says that she’s all in, she prays every night in a mix of joy and desperation. Joy that Arizona is _there_ , that her future has come back. Desperation that this entire situation doesn’t eventually chase the other woman off. She wakes up in the middle of the night, sometimes, from a dream about Arizona walking away again, and after catching her breath, after sliding a shaking hand out to touch the warm sleeping body beside her, she prays. She doesn’t know how many Hail Marys are required for this penance.  
  
Then the accident happens. She wakes up with a “yes” on her lips and a prayer in her heart. That Arizona is still there when she opens her eyes, that their baby is still alive. Her prayers are answered. Two days later, after Arizona’s best friend arrives, she wakes up to Arizona’s hand in hers, and her rosary that’s usually stashed in the living room wrapped around her fiancée’s left wrist, the one from their bedroom looped around the hospital bed’s guard rail. She remembers seeing that same rosary looped around the guardrail in another hospital, in Miami, when she was twenty years old and her abuela was dying. She’d taken the rosary when her beloved grandmother, during one of her last days of lucid consciousness, had pressed it into her hands, saying “Nieta, nunca dejar de orar,” in the softest, weakest voice she’d ever heard from her strong, vocal, abuelita. And she had only stopped praying the once since.  
  
Even when she didn’t have the manual dexterity to trace the beads with her fingers, she traced them with her eyes, praying for her daughter to survive, her fiancée to stay, her own body to recover. She prayed as hard as she could, and sometimes, when she woke in the middle of the night, she would glimpse Arizona still sitting up, tracing the rosary looped around her pale, thin wrist with her fingers.  
  
A few months later she asks her mother, “So what bothers you more? My bastard child or my lesbian fiancée?” She hadn’t quite imagined how it would feel for her mother to condemn her to a hell she’s not quite sure she still believes in. It’s like a slap across the face and a punch to the gut at once. She wants to turn the other cheek, but this is her daughter and the love of her life. Even through her tears she will protect her girls from the hatred the world wants to rain down on them. She just never expected that hatred to come from her own mother. And that is unforgivable.  
  
On her wedding night, the wedding that really counts in her heart even if it’s not legal (yet, in this state – they’ll have to look into a vacation to Massachusetts or Vancouver or something), she sprawls across the bed in the bridal suite of the Archfield, their daughter with her daddy, and she keeps herself awake even after Arizona collapses into sleep, sweaty and sated. Running the fingers of her left hand through curly blond hair, she stops for a second to grin sappily at the ring on her finger before returning to her subtle caresses. Damn, she’s supposed to be tough, hardcore, badass, whatever. Above all this soppy crap, but Arizona has always brought it out in her. Every façade she’s built up after the world tries to tear her down, Arizona doesn’t so much demolish as simply bypass. That’s always been her fear in their relationship – only Arizona has ever had so much of her that she had the power to destroy her. She never gave that up to George, or Mark, or Erica, or her handful of casual, short-term relationships beforehand. She’s given her body, sometimes her heart, but never everything, never given that power over to another person. If Arizona chose to do so, she’d end. Simply end. But now, after all the things they’ve gone through, all the hurt and pain and tears and joy, she trusts her wife, her Arizona, not to do that, to instead hold her and cherish her and protect her and love her. So she prays. In thanks, in hope, and in love.


End file.
